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Rhetoric
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What is Rhetoric?

Rhetoric is the study of how language is used to persuade, inform, and influence audiences, and it sits at the center of communications, English, political science, and philosophy curricula. Its academic interest lies in the tension between language and reality, form and meaning, power and reason. Students engage with foundational questions about what makes an argument effective and how speech shapes public life. Core thinkers and frameworks that appear across coursework include Aristotle's definition of rhetoric, Plato's critique of false rhetoric as it relates to democracy, Foucault's contributions to rhetoric and ideology, and the competing positions of Bitzer and Vatz on how rhetorical situations are constructed.

Papers on this topic take several distinct approaches. Some are historically oriented, tracing classical and modern rhetorical theory to compare how ideas about persuasion have evolved. Others focus on close analysis of specific texts or speeches, such as Carmichael's Black Power speech or George Orwell's political writing, using rhetorical frameworks to examine how language and power operate together. Additional papers explore rhetoric within specific domains — religion, education, and political ideology — while others work through theoretical debates about the relationship between knowledge and rhetoric or the role of rhetorical education in shaping civic life.

A strong essay on rhetoric grounds its thesis in a clear claim about how a specific use of language achieves — or fails to achieve — a persuasive effect. Evidence drawn from the text, speech, or theoretical framework under analysis carries the most weight. The most common pitfall is treating rhetoric as merely a list of devices; effective essays instead connect those devices to broader questions of audience, power, and meaning.

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Paper Undergraduate

Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the Age of Enlightenment

The eighteenth century was the age of revolutions and wars of independence around the world. The century is commonly known as the "age of enlightenment," but one could also refer to it as the age of "humankind's…

Research Paper Doctorate

Red Azalea by Anchee Min: Cultural Revolution Memoir Analysis

This paper is a book review of Anchee Min's personal memoir, Red Azalea. Min's memoir appears to be a record of the insanity, fear, and human wickedness that pervaded the Cultural Revolution. During this period bad people found a way to get away with wicked deeds, even gaining society's approval and political advancement from these deeds. More importantly, good people, even those who were strong like Min and Yan, were pressured to give in and do wicked deeds themselves. The numerous personal and political betrayals throughout the book are a metaphor of the wider betrayal of the Chinese people by the ruling Communist Party, who never delivered on its promise of a society without injustice and unfairness.

Paper Undergraduate

Ideological Criticism of Virginia Woolf's "Professions for Women"

Approaching Virginia Woolf's "Professions for Women" from the perspective of ideological criticism reveals a number of important things about the text as well as rhetorical criticism in general. In particular, it reveals how certain words function as "ideographs," or the units of ideology in rhetoric. By analyzing Woolf's particular formulation of women, one can see how the concept of "woman" is a complex of different, often-times conflicting meanings, and that gender equality will only become a reality when these meanings are dictated not by dominant males, but by women themselves.

Paper Doctorate

Descartes and Langer on Rhetoric, Language, and Knowledge

For Rene Descartes, rhetoric is useless in the face of direct knowledge. Mathematics and the scientific method are sufficient means of acquiring knowledge. Rhetoric should not substitute for clear communication of ideas…

Research Paper Undergraduate

Joe Biden's Plagiarism Scandals and Political Consequences

Senator Joe Biden might be the first man in his family to have gone to university, and his wife the first in hers, but Biden is also most likely to be the first man in his family to have been caught plagiarizing.

Paper Doctorate

William Blake's Worldview in "The Lamb": Innocence & Faith

William Blake's poem, "The Lamb," is one of twenty-three poems he published in his compilation, Songs of Innocence, and it may very well be the most famous of his poems in that work.

Paper Doctorate

Same-Sex Marriage, DOMA, and the Equality Argument

The right of same-sex couples to marry could not be less relevant to my life, but I cannot help but notice our apparent inability to learn from past experience as a nation. Simultaneously with the historic election of…

Research Paper Doctorate

KKK vs. IRA: Comparing Domestic and Foreign Extremist Groups

Terrorism has a long and violent history; this is especially true of religious terrorism. While the conditions under which each extremist group operates are different, there nevertheless exist similarities.

Paper Doctorate

Chinese Pilgrim Perceptions of India: History & Religion

The Chinese attitudes of India "vary from total absence of curiosity to wild fanciful misapprehension" and from these attitudes, the perceptions of the Chinese towards India can be derived (Mather, 1992).

Paper Doctorate

The Literature of German Nationalism: Three Phases Analyzed

German Nationalism can be divided into three periods: unification, expansion, and implosion. Each of these phases is conveyed through various sources of German Nationalist literature.

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